1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a printer and to a printing control method that includes determining if reprinting is necessary when an error occurs during a printing process.
2. Related Art
Printers that print to a continuous print medium such as label paper or roll paper having a continuous web of paper wound into a roll, and reprint the same content when, for example, an error occurs during printing and normal printing is temporarily disabled are known from the literature. Japanese Unexamined Patent Appl. Pub. JP-A-2002-36640, for example, teaches a label printer for printing a set of plural labels that, when a paper jam or other error occurs while printing, reprints the entire label set (a plurality of labels printed continuously in a single print job) containing the label that was being printed when the error occurred instead of reprinting only the one label.
Even if an error occurs during printing, however, the labels that were already printed can be used and do not need to be reprinted if there is no damage (that is, the label was printed normally) in the actual printing area (the area in which content is actually printed) of the paper. However, when the error detection means of the label printer taught in JP-A-2002-36640 determines that an error occurred while printing a label set, the printer always reprints the entire label set when operation resumes after the error is corrected. This means that all labels will be reprinted even if there is no damage to the actual printing area of the labels and reprinting is not necessary, the printer thus prints needlessly, and consumables such as paper and ink are wasted.
In order to reprint only when reprinting is actually necessary, it is conceivable to reprint only when damage to the actual printing area of the paper or the content printed therein is detected by an image sensor. However, this method requires adding a costly image sensor to the printer. Another problem with this method is that because the image sensor must be located downstream from the printing position, the size of the printer is necessarily increased. Executing the detection process to confirm if there is damage to the actual printing area of the paper or the content printed therein while printing also reduces the processing speed and printer throughput.